On mindless eating

Anyone else prone to mindless eating? You know, you’re sitting at home or in the office, and you’re either bored or stress or thinking about a delicious food item (or both), and even though you’re not hungry, before you know it you’re standing with the fridge door open, or you’re looking into the display case at the local cupcakery.

I’m a believer that mindless eating is a big, big, big contributor to the North American waistline expansion. There are definitely people who only eat when they are hungry, and stop eating when they are full, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they are not overweight. This post is not for those people. For the rest of us…

Do you ever stop yourself when you’re about to go get some food even though you’re not hungry? Ever think that maybe there’s another solution to your boredom, stress, or desire for that rewarding feeling you get from eating something delicious?

This is really another look into my new found fascination with habits and behaviour, which I also wrote about last month in the post, should you eat when you’re not hungry?. In this post, I suggested a couple of options for self-rewards that I found effective. I suspect those might be a bit flighty for some, so I thought I’d offer up some more alternatives to mindless eating.

Did you know that the brain’s reward system is actually based on food and sex? It makes sense if you think about it. We are wired to encourage survival, which requires us to eat and have sex. So is it any surprise that we yearn for delicious food?

I think this is an interesting consideration when we look at mindless eating. I’m not suggesting that we should give up on resisting the temptation of delicious foods at all hours of the day – that would be a health nightmare! I am suggesting that we should recognize it; acknowledge it; and then come up with strategies to address it. And by “it”, I mean the notion that food is a reward.

If each bout of mindless eating is a yearning for a reward, then couldn’t we come up with alternative rewards? Ones that don’t contribute to weight gain?

Next time you find your feet taking you for a walk to the fridge, take a look at this list and see if there’s something here you can do instead of eating that will feel rewarding:

phone a friend

go for a walk

have sex

do some push ups (from the knees or to the counter instead of the floor counts)

listen to your favourite song

draw

read a few pages of a great book

play with your kids

take care of an item on your ‘to do’ list

masturbate

hug your partner

go for a bike ride

fly a kite

write a thank you note to someone important to you

pet your cat

go outside and admire your garden

dance to whatever song is playing

play fetch with your dog

go outside and talk to your neighbour

donate ten bucks to your favourite charity

Twenty things you can do that will give you as much or more of a rewarding feeling than any cookie or bag of chips could. I just avoided a handful of chocolate chips by being aware of what I was doing and choosing to call one of my best friends instead. Much more satisfying!

Have you ever tried this approach to avoiding mindless eating? Do you have any suggestions to add to the list?

Elsbeth Vaino, B.Sc., CSCS, is a personal trainer in Ottawa who is fascinated by human behaviour.